Born in Groveland, Illinois, on October 22, 1834, Abigail Scott was of a large and hardworking farm family and received only scanty schooling. In 1852 the family made the arduous wagon trek to Oregon, during which her mother and a brother died. They settled in Lafayette, where Abigail taught school until she married Benjamin C. Duniway in August 1853. Over the next ten years she led just such a life of farm drudgery as she had known as a child, although she was able to find time to write Captain Gray╒s Company, 1859, a tale of crossing the Plains to Oregon and the first novel to come out of the Pacific Northwest. The Duniway farm was lost in 1862 to a poor business deal entered into by her husband without her knowledge, and shortly afterward he was accidentally disabled. To support the family she operated a boarding school in Lafayette until 1866, when she became a teacher in Albany. Later she ran a successful millinery and notions store for five years.
The resentment over women╒s legal disabilities that had been growing in Duniway for years, given impetus by the loss of the farm, prompted her to move to Portland in 1871 and establish the New Northwest, a newspaper dedicated to women╒s rights and to woman suffrage as the prerequisite for legal reform. Later that year she managed a Northwest speaking tour by Susan B. Anthony. In 1873 she led in organizing the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association, of which she was chosen president a short time later. In 1875 she published a volume of poems, My Musings, and in 1876 David and Anna Matson, a long poem. She traveled and spoke constantly throughout the state, forming local suffrage groups and building support for the cause. She also lobbied and addressed the state legislature on several occasions.
A number of reforms in the legal status of women passed the legislature, but Duniway╒s main goal, equal suffrage, eluded her. A statewide vote on an equal suffrage amendment to the state constitution in 1884 failed to support the measure. In that year she was elected a vice-president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Her efforts nonetheless bore fruit elsewhere, as she was given much credit for the adoption of woman suffrage by Washington Territory in 1883 and, after she closed the New Northwest in 1887 and moved with her family to Idaho, by that state in 1896. In 1894 she had returned to Portland, Oregon, and in 1895 had become editor of the weekly Pacific Empire, through which she resumed the battle for woman suffrage. She was also again chosen president of the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association, which had fallen into inactivity after the defeat of 1884. A second referendum in 1900 also failed. In 1905 the National American Woman Suffrage Association mounted its own Oregon campaign, including an appearance by retired president Susan B. Anthony; Duniway resigned from the state organization and played no part in the campaign, which failed in the 1906 referendum.
In 1905 she published her second novel, From the West to the West. She subsequently returned to leadership of the state group and led referendum campaigns in 1908 and 1910, both of which failed. By 1912 she was confined to a wheelchair and could play little part in the campaign of that year that finally succeeded in writing woman suffrage into the Oregon constitution. She nevertheless was accorded major credit for the victory because of her decades of groundwork, and she was given the privilege of drawing up the official proclamation and signing it with the governor. She then became the first Oregon woman to register for the vote. In 1914 she published Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States. She died in Portland, Oregon, on October 11, 1915.
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